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Former president Barack Obama, campaigning with vice presidential nominee Tim Walz at a Wisconsin rally last week, strongly urged supporters in the battleground state to take advantage of early voting and cast ballots for the Democratic ticket as soon as possible.
"Even one or two extra votes per precinct will be enough to win this thing and send Kamala to the White House," said Obama, who is, as the Associated Press noted, the only president to carry Wisconsin by more than a percentage point in the past six elections. "If you haven't voted yet, I won't be offended if you just walk out right now," he told the crowd. "Go vote! Go do it!"
With the election just days away, Obama went on the attack against the Republican nominee.
"Wisconsin, we do not need to see what an older, loonier Donald Trump looks like with no guardrails," he said. I agree with him there. Trump's character is atrocious and his influence on American politics has been poisonous. As president, he presided over some fine achievements — meaningful tax cuts, the Abraham Accords, repeal of the Obamacare mandate, abrogation of the Iran nuclear deal — but his presidency was also a freak show of insults, narcissism, shattered civic norms, and false accusations, culminating in the violent US Capitol mayhem of Jan. 6, 2021.
So when Obama warns against another Trump presidency, he gets no argument from me.
But Obama also claimed to be mystified by the polarized, partisan acrimony that has come to dominate American politics. "There are times," he told the crowd in Wisconsin, "where I don't understand how we got so toxic and just so divided and so bitter."
Really? A glance in the mirror might jog his memory.
Because well before there was Trump, there was Obama. And Obama's presidency was the most polarizing in modern history up to that time.
Obama himself acknowledged as much in his 2016 State of the Union address, as he was beginning his eighth year in the White House.
One of the "few regrets" of his presidency, he told the assembled members of Congress, was "that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better." Were he endowed with "the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt," he remarked, he could have done more to bridge the partisan divide.
Four years earlier, when he was nearing the end of his first term and running for a second, he had said much the same thing.
"I'm the first one to confess that the spirit that I brought to Washington, that I wanted to see instituted, where we weren't constantly in a political slugfest . . . I haven't fully accomplished that," Obama told "60 Minutes" in September 2012. "My biggest disappointment is that we haven't changed the tone in Washington as much as I would have liked." He even acknowledged, when pressed by the CBS interviewer, that he was to blame for some of the ill will: "As president, I bear responsibility for everything to some degree."
To be sure, the nation's politics grew even more virulent and divided once Trump came on the scene. But give Trump this much: He never claimed to be a healer. Obama did, over and over.
From the moment he stepped on the national stage, Obama committed himself to elevating the tone of public discourse, to bringing red and blue America together, to leading the nation into a new era of political goodwill. A key reason he was running for president, he told Boston Globe editors and reporters in January 2008, was to repair a political system that had gotten "stuck in this deeply polarized pattern." He promised that there would be reconciliation and that it would start with him: "I'm not going to demonize you because you disagree with me," he said.
Obama's pledge to be a unifier was the central theme of his presidential campaign. It went to the heart of his political appeal and led countless voters to invest great hope in the prospect of an Obama presidency.
But it never happened. And it wasn't only Republicans who noticed.
"Rather than being a unifier, Mr. Obama has divided America on the basis of race, class, and partisanship," wrote two Democratic pollsters, Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen, in July 2010. "Moreover, his cynical approach to governance has encouraged his allies to pursue a similar strategy of racially divisive politics on his behalf."
Obama took to personalizing his political criticisms with ad hominem attacks that — in those days — were not normal fare from presidents. When the Supreme Court issued its ruling in the Citizens United case, Obama attacked the justices to their faces as they attended his address to a joint session of Congress. During the debate over healthcare, as The Wall Street Journal noted, "Obama did not merely disagree with opponents but accused them of being ‘cynical and irresponsible,' spreading ‘misinformation,' and making ‘bogus,' ‘wild,' or ‘false' claims through ‘demagoguery and distortion.' "
By the time of his 2012 reelection campaign against Mitt Romney, Obama had abandoned the politics of hope and unity. He focused instead on winning a second term by any means necessary. Even left-leaning media outlets were struck by his harshness.
"Obama and his top campaign aides have engaged far more frequently in character attacks and personal insults than the Romney campaign," Politico reported in 2012. "Obama and his aides have used an arsenal of techniques — personal ridicule, suggestions of ethical misdeeds, and aspersions against Romney's patriotism — that many voters and commentators claim to abhor, even as the tactics have regularly proved effective…. The Obama-led attacks on Romney's character have been … both relentless and remorseless."
It was Obama who urged Latino voters to "punish our enemies and ... reward our friends," Obama who exhorted Democratic supporters that "If [Republicans] bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," and Obama who smeared legislators opposed to the Affordable Care Act for caring about only one thing: "making sure that 30 million people don't have health care."
No, the polarization of American political life did not begin under Obama. He wasn't to blame for the fact that partisan antipathy had been growing since the 1990s. But Obama deserves considerable blame for never making an effort to slow or reverse that trend. It would not have required "the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt" to try to raise the tone of the nation's discourse. As I remarked in 2016, the gifts of Gerald Ford would have done nicely.
Prior to Obama, no chief executive in modern times was as quick to impugn his critics' motives or to demonize those who opposed him. After he left the White House, the sour spitefulness of American politics grew far worse, thanks above all to Trump's malignant influence (with an assist from Joe Biden). But the downward spiral was underway years before Trump descended that escalator in 2015. It wasn't all Obama's doing. But it was Obama who had pledged, again and again, to lead the way in restoring a measure of harmony to American politics — but never even tried.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.
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